Stolen babies: an 800 gram slab in empty coffin iillustrates the face of decades of continuing impunity
The discovery of a piece of ceramic in a child’s coffin during the exhumation of reprisals of the Franco regime in the Alicante cemetery revives the need of those affected for justice to be done.
by Miguel Ángel Valero @mavmiralles 20 Mar 2021
On March 9, Matilde Ruiz approached the municipal cemetery of Alicante to meet the team of archaeologists who, since the beginning of the month, have been excavating in pit X where the remains of eleven reprisals by the Franco regime in 1940 are located.
Matilde is a woman “With a lot of spirit”, as she herself admits, and her intention when going to the cemetery was to ask for the collaboration of archaeologists who, looking for the remains of a Francoist crime, found evidence of another crime from the same period whose victims are still alive in their majority and trying to see that justice is done.
Pit X, located in quadrant 12 of the Alicante cemetery, was dug in its day to dump the bodies of those defeated in the Civil War, but later it also served to deposit the remains of deceased babies and mutilated members from the General Hospital of Alicante .
This circumstance is what led them to the discovery of a child’s coffin inside which only two fragments of a ceramic slab of about 800 grams were found, supposedly deposited to simulate the weight of a deceased newborn: an obvious clue to the theft of babies, practice.
